If you want people to learn from history, it helps if you let the people living throught it, write it.

"What's the point of learning about history?"  I remember kids asking, and the stock answer always came back  "You can learn from it," or even "You can learn from the mistakes people made and not repeat them."
Well, that's fine, if people at the time are allowed to record history and later generations are allowed access to it. A shining example of learning from history is the collection of evidence from the accident at Chornobyl, papers from people who had the moral integrity and courage to collect and publish.
 The publication is Chernobyl, Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, and it has given the rest of the world a far better insight into what happens and goes on happening after a nuclear accident.
When I think of the nations involved, it is the honesty and bravery of these individuals that comes into my mind.  It isn't a criticism of what has happened; that is history.
We seem to be going through yet another period of governments thinking that enforced censorship is a good thing.  I find it strange that folk who purport to be elected by "the people" then seem to find it their duty to keep the truth from the very people who put them there to represent them.
There is a piece in nuclear-news by Ralf Nader, published in Common Dreams, which I found enlightening.
http://nuclear-news.net/2014/01/25/ralph-nader-warns-on-nuclear-power-and-civil-liberties/#more-62409
The United Kingdom, which I come from, doesn't exactly have an exemplary history of not putting the public in its own country, or overseas, at risk.  Anyone who has ever watched "Silent Storm" must be aware of this.... and this is just one episode in our nuclear history that we know about. 
In the USA, a rare film showing is about to happen. Film goers in Washington DC and New York City will be able to watch Nuclear Savage:The Islands of Project 4.1. The film director, Adam Horowitz will be at the panel discussion in Washington.. but you must register to see this film at the Goethe-Institut.
The film is one of many potent stories being brought to the USA by the International Uranium Film Festival, and I wonder how many U.S. citizens know about the testing of the nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, I mean, really know about the testing of nuclear weapons in these islands. The organisers of the festival have supplied some background reading for this film and even if you aren't in Washington DC or New York City, this is, to my mind, worth reading. You may then understand why you might not have seen it on your television screen.
The link is http://www.4thmedia.org/2014/01/11/media-coverup-of-impacts-of-u-s-nuclear-weapons-testing-on-native-people-in-the-pacific/
To find out more about dates and locations, go to the International Uranium Film Festival website and hover over the traveling festival tab to show the details. http://www.uraniumfilmfestival.org/index.php/en/
or go direct to the Goethe-Institut, Washington or the Pavilion Theater, New York, websites.

What happens when a film is about your life?

On November 27th  the travelling Uranium film festival arrives in the USA.  The main festival takes place each year in Rio de Janeiro, when films from all over the world are entered for the festival. It's the only one of its kind, showing films about nuclear power, uranium mining, nuclear weapons and the health effects of radioactivity. You can find out a lot more from their amazing website.
The first films will be shown in Albuquerque NM, followed by screenings in Santa Fe and Window Rock.  Next year films will be shown in Washington D.C. and in New York City in February.
One of the films is 'The River That Harms'.  Just fourteen weeks after the accident at Three Mile Island, which a great many people have heard about, there was another nuclear tragedy, which I for one, did not find out out about for many years.
When I read that ninety million gallons of liquid nuclear waste and eleven hundred tons of solid mill wastes burst through a broken dam wall at the Church Rock Uranium Mill Facility, contaminating the Puerco River,  and I had never heard about it, I was bemused.
Many of the people affected were from the Navajo Nation. It was the river they lived by. It was the land that their animals grazed and the water that they drank, and the pools that their children played in....
Now we have films about children who don't play outside in Japan and children whose lives were affected by a poisoned river in the USA. But did their parents ever think it would happen to them, or that a film would be made about them? If the films weren't made, would you know about them?
The uranium that powered the plants in Fukushima, apparently, came from mines in Australia, but I also read of protests and long protest marches by Aboriginal people along with international protesters against the mining of uranium  http://indymedia.org.au/2013/05/10/wgar-news-walkatjurra-walkabout-stepping-out-against-uranium-mining-wanfa-anawa
 Our children, your children, have the right to be in happy films in a bright future.  It's up to us to see that this happens.

World Water Day

Today is, was, or will be, according to your position on the planet, World Water Day. I have always thought that water should be free, by right, ... there to drink, wash, swim and play in.  Furthermore, it should be clean.  It should neither be contaminated with pesticides or disease, nor should it be dangerously radioactive over thousands of years either from uranium mining, tritium leaks from nuclear power plants, or radioactive contamination from  leaking storage pools.
We are told that it is one of our most precious commodities, that we have to save it.  But perhaps we should save it from ourselves.